Hello and welcome to summer! Boy, I let this entry slide. The Two Eleanors show closes this Friday, but I couldn’t let these photos go to waste. Let’s jump right to it, and you can read a bit about the show below the snapshots…

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Eleanor Ray: Ladder Day

Eleanor Williams: Paper & Bones

May 6th – June 24th

Opening Reception at SCRAP, Friday, May 6,4:30-6:00pm

March 15, 2011 – Re:Vision Gallery is pleased to present the mixed media work of Eleanor Williams and an installation by Eleanor Ray.

Eleanor Williams’ and Eleanor Ray’s joint show at Re:Vision Gallery explores themes of personal and group storytelling in a wider cultural context. Their visual language goes up, under and through our aesthetic expectations, resulting in thoughtful, engaging work that combines references to deep cultural symbols with unexpected twists that pop.

Eleanor Ray’s Ladder Day, a video co-directed by Benjamin Rhiger accompanied by a sculptural installation, began with an investigation into the moral authority invested in a person in a very large dress. The work combines complex elements of mirroring and story-telling, pseudo-historical reenactment and cultural-religious symbology. Inspired by the religious-educational dioramas and videos at theMormonTemple inSalt Lake City,Utah, her work explores the convergence of myth-making, folklore, costume play and popular culture. The “evidence” on display will include a ten foot knitted ladder made of paper, a haunting video work, works on paper, and a costume from the video displayed in a diorama of the anachronistic American frontier.

Eleanor Williams’ mixed-media sculpture and collage is an experiment in craft. Her work explores all of the personal and collective memories stored in the act of making. Quilts, books and baskets, all traditional craft forms, are distorted and perhaps perverted, pushing them to the boundary where lines between art and craft cannot be distinguished.

Both artists explore the authority and symbology in objects, often with the craft itself the center of focus. They are playing with the myth that is built on the act of re-telling, concluding not in the jumbled results achieved in a game of telephone, but something much more intelligent, asking the big questions about how we define ourselves in the act of creation.

Another reason why I love the Estate Store blog for Community Warehouse, 3969 NE MLK: this post on public design & typography. The blog is a series of charming posts about and riffs on the merchandise for sale in the store, and I visit it as often I remember to; you should too!

Alright, that’s enough scans and videos for now. Here’s a single photo of a small protest at Planned Parenthood last Wednesday:

These folks used to show up on Friday afternoons, but this is the first time I’ve seen them at all in a while. If you’d like to join them, I don’t have any guesses about how they decide when to show up.

I’m never going in this place – I prefer to be left alone when I’m working out in a gym, with my ratpod and a book – but you might want to wander in sometime and join CrossFit H.E.L.’s bootcamp sessions: